her soul for freedom
by Nightingales Fall
Summary: Or the one where someone wakes up in the off of their favorite One Piece character. Except now that character is a girl, she doesn't know how to fight, and the Plot is fast approaching. Winging it and following the Plot is her only option, but the smallest changes may have bigger consequences than she realizes.


**Warnings for body horror, body dysphoria, and self harm via punching things really hard**.

 _Plink_.

Harsh, panting breaths fill the air.

 _Plink_.

Blood stains her fist.

 _Plink_.

The shattered mirror is smeared with it. Glass shards fall in the sink. She stares into the fractured reflection of eyes that aren't her own and unthinkingly punches the mirror again.

And again.

And again.

She only stops when her reflection can't be seen through the shatter lines and blood. The white ceramic sink is red. Bloodied glass shards pool around the drain. On autopilot she turns the water on and sticks her hand under the faucet.

The water runs red and then pink. A few stray shards of glass fall into the sink and then down the drain. She spares a thought to wonder if they'll clog up the drain and decides she doesn't care.

The pain barely registers.

There's no medicine cabinet behind the mirror. The bathroom walls are made of dark wood, as is the floor. The sink and toilet are both ceramic. There's no bathtub or shower. No decorations either.

There is a cup with a lot of toothbrushes, all of them different, and she stares at them with blank eyes while her blood washes down the drain.

That's the only familiar thing – the blood. It's red as it should be, whereas everything else is off. Her hair is too dark and too long. Her eyes dark too, where they should be a grey shade of blue. Her skin isn't pale, it's a healthy shade of brown like she's spent her whole life under the sun instead of inside with her nose in a book or behind a computer screen. Her hands are rough and scarred, with surprising strength, but slim. They look nothing like they should.

Nothing looks like it should except her blood.

The water runs clear. She turns the faucet off and wraps her hand in toilet paper. It's a shitty makeshift bandage, but it should hold until she can find a real bandage.

She doesn't know where to find a bandage. She doesn't even know where she is. She'd gone to sleep at home and opened her eyes here, in a body that isn't hers.

Even the muscle memory isn't her own. That's what got her to the bathroom, the habits of whoever's body she was inhabiting, muscle memories built up over the years. It'd been alarming, moving on an instinct that wasn't her own, far too much like she'd been a passenger rather than in the driver's seat.

But she'd also been panicking. Her thoughts had been a jumble. Now they're clear (too clear) and she's all too aware of every movement she makes. Of every sensation against her skin. The pressure of her feet against the ground. The roughness of the toilet paper around her hand. The strange texture of this body's skin, feeling rubbery beneath the hand clenched around her wrist.

Their wrist? The body's wrist?

She feels a wave of nausea wash over her and squeezes her eyes shut. She's in control. Her thoughts are what move this body. No, it doesn't look the same. It doesn't _feel_ the same. But for better or worse, it's hers and she must deal with that. Until she can find a way back to her own body, this is how it will be.

Decided, she opens her eyes. The mirror's still there shattered and smeared with her blood. She doesn't have the slightest idea how to clean it up (there doesn't seem to be any cleaning supplies in the bathroom aside from a toilet scrubber) so she decides to leave it for now. Her current priority should be figuring out where she is and _who_ she is. Everything else can come after.

Which means she needs to leave the bathroom.

She wasn't paying attention on her way to the bathroom, too busy panicking, so she doesn't know what to expect. The bathroom and it's many toothbrushes gives her more questions than answers. Is this body an orphan in an orphanage? Do they have a lot of siblings? Is this place a homeless shelter?

She doesn't _know_. How can she prepare if she doesn't know? How can she bring herself to step outside when she doesn't know what she'll be stepping into? It could be post-apocalyptic out there! There could be zombies!

She hates zombies. They're dumb. If she's somehow ended up in a zombie apocalypse, she's going to yeet herself off the nearest cliff post-haste. It'll be less painful than existing in a world where humans were dumb enough to cause an actual zombie apocalypse.

But all that is dependent on her going outside. Which she still hasn't done.

It's hard. Opening the door requires grabbing the handle and she kind of needs to look at it to do that and that means she must see her hand – the body's hand – _the hand that isn't her own_ moving when she tells it to and god, she thinks she's going to be sick.

The metal handle is slick under her palm. She's sweating. She's never been a nervous sweater before, and maybe it's this body, but…she's terrified. Her insides feel like they're being squeezed and her breathing is a little trembly. It's not doing any good for her stomach, which still feels like it might eject its contents any moment.

She inhales. Exhales.

Opens the door.

 **-o0o-**

It's anticlimactic, really. Outside the bathroom is a wood paneled hall. There's a set of stairs at one end and two doorways at the other. The house, or whatever it is, is quiet. Faintly, she thinks she can hear someone – or several someones – snoring. It must be early in the day. Or very late at night.

She shuts the bathroom door behind her and heads towards the doorways at the end of the hall. One leads to a kitchen. The other leads to a large room filled with sleeping men. There's a pit in the middle of the room filled with the embers of a fire. The scene niggles at her mind, familiar though she can't figure out why. It's there, barely out of reach, tantalizingly close.

The last thing she wants is to wake up a bunch of people who probably know the original inhabitant of her body. Since she doesn't even know who they are, passing herself off as them would take an act of god level miracle and she's fresh out of those. Quiet as a mouse, she turns around and heads towards the stairs at the other end of the hall. Maybe there'll be a window she can climb out of.

Up the stairs is another room like the one down below. Big and open, filled with boxes and a pile of blankets and pillows smack in the middle. She gets the uneasy feeling that this is the room her body's original inhabitant slept in. It's a mess, but there's something oddly comforting about it.

And there is a window. The drop from it is higher than she'd like and makes her feel a little wobbly, but she needs _out_. She needs to figure out where she is. _Who_ she is.

Because she can't remember. She knows this body is wrong, knows this place is wrong, can remember a life before this and things she liked, but she can't remember _who she was_. What was her name? Did she have a family? Brothers, sisters? Aunts, Uncles, cousins? Were they a large family? Small? Did she like her family or did she hate them?

Why can't she remember her own name?

All these questions flash through her mind as she maneuvers her way out the window. She doesn't look down until she's dangling from the ledge. Part of her marvels at the ease with which she can hold herself up. The rest of her is gibbering about stupid ideas and how _it's so fucking high what was I thinking oh my god_ and that part of her really needs to shut up.

She lets go.

It doesn't hurt when she hits the ground. She lands perfectly, with hardly a sound, like she's been dropping from heights all her life. She rests her forehead in her hands and breathes through the wave of nauseated horror that thought brings about. She hasn't been dropping from heights her whole life. She's terrified of them. She has only the most abstract concept of an idea of how to land correctly after a fall from a long height.

She's pretty sure it shouldn't have been that easy, that there's something up with this body beyond the fact that it's not her own and she's trying really _fucking_ hard not to think about it.

To continue not thinking about it she turns around to survey her surroundings. She hopes for some clue about where she is, but the world doesn't provide. The house exists smack dab in the middle of a forest and nothing about it is familiar beyond the most basic concept of tree and forest. She doesn't know what species of trees they are.

What she does know is that they're bigger than any trees she's seen before and she's kind of, maybe, a little in love with them.

They're gorgeous, really. Tall and towering, with trunks three men couldn't wrap their arms around. These are the kind of trees you'd expect to find in an ancient forest inhabited by all manner of mythical beings. These are trees untouched by the greed and corruption of humans. They're wild and chaotic and beautiful.

She must be far from home if there's trees like this around.

What a depressing thought.

Her wonder is snuffed out like a candle. She feels a well of despair threaten to swallow her whole. There are no trees like this where she comes from. There is _nothing_ like this where she comes from.

She doesn't know how to explain the difference because its not just the trees. There's something in the air, something in the way it all _looks_ , like it's all a shade off from normal and she doesn't – she can't –

"I can't do this," she says aloud and fuck, even her voice is different. And she'd expected that, she had, but the reality is…fuck.

She sits down right where she's at and puts her head in her hands. Deep breaths, don't flip out, do not puke all over yourself. That would be bad. Don't puke, be calm, breathe…

She's so busy trying not to flip the fuck out that she doesn't hear the front door open. She doesn't hear the footsteps as they come around or the startled half-gasp, half-shriek someone lets out when they find her there collapsed on the ground in a shivering, panicky heap, head in her hands and obviously flipping the fuck out.

"Luffy?"

 **-o0o-**

Dogra wakes up with his face mashed in someone's armpit, one leg asleep under a pile of bandits, and choking on someone's gas. He gags and rips himself away from the bandit pile – or puppy pile as Luffy insists on calling them – and half crawls, half stumbles to the bathroom. His leg goes from numbness to the uncomfortable and almost painful feeling of pins and needles. He hits it with a fist and swears under his breath.

He doesn't notice the blood, at first.

He goes into the bathroom, intent on doing his morning business and planning to take advantage of being the first awake. He reaches for a toothbrush without thinking and looks up.

There's a lot of blood.

Dogra feels the blood drain from his face. He doesn't know whose blood it is or where it came from, what caused it, but he does know it isn't from any of the bandits. He knows those idiots too well and they'd all been asleep, including the Boss.

The only other person who uses this bathroom is Luffy.

Dogra drops his toothbrush and bolts down the hall and up the stairs. Luffy isn't there. The window is open. He doesn't stop to look out, just bolts back down the stairs and out the front door. He doesn't even think to grab a weapon – what use would a weapon be? Anything that can take Luffy will make easy pickings of him.

Not that it matters. He finds Luffy on her knees, face in her hands, shaking like a leaf in the wind, just around the corner of the house.

"Luffy?"

She flinches. Looks up. He notices one hand is wrapped in toilet paper and stained with blood. Her eyes are wild. Her cheeks wet. She looks hysterical and Dogra has never ever seen Luffy look like this.

Not even after Sabo died.

She states at him. "What did you say?"

"Luffy…?" Dogra repeats slowly, uneasy for reasons he can't explain.

Then she starts to laugh hysterically and all bets are off.

"BOSS! BOSS DADAN!"

 **I've seen fics like this for Naruto but not One Piece (they're all reincarnation fics in the one piece fandom) and figured why not?**

 **Come find me on tumblr @agalaxyofstars**


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